Trends This Week – Market correction or Market Crash? – 01.20.16

Gerald Celente breaks down how the talking airheads on business broadcast media keep missing the larger picture of crumbling worldwide economies and the undeniable underlying factors that ultimately will determine economic fate and your bottom line. While future quantitative easing measures or other central bank interventions may temporarily pause the sharp declines in markets worldwide, Global recession and even depression in some countries are unavoidable. Celente tells you what you need to know now.

Trends This Week – 2016: Big Risks, Big Opportunities – 12.30.15

Gerald Celente provides some insights to what major trends his Trends Research Institute are forecasting for the year ahead. Celente and his analysts are predicting a year of geo-political and economic turbulence the likes of which the world has not seen in generations. But the year will also present opportunities – Golden Opportunities, as Celente has labeled the trend – for new profit potential, meaningful work and service and social movements to take shape to generate political and cultural reforms.

Dean Baker – Your retirement prospects are bleaker than ever

The vast majority of Americans who expect to retire in the next decade can count on little income other than their Social Security. This is true not only for low-income workers, who have struggled most of their lives, but also for millions of middle-income workers. Although Social Security is a tremendously important program, and provides a solid base that retirees …

Paul Craig Roberts – What Does Today’s “Rate Hike” Mean?

The Federal Reserve raised the interbank borrowing rate today by one quarter of one percent or 25 basis points. Readers are asking, “what does that mean?” It means that the Fed has had time to figure out that the effect of the small “rate hike” would essentially be zero. In other words, the small increase in the target rate from …

Bill Holter – More Market Instability? The Highly Leveraged Nature of our Financial System is Teetering

This week shapes up as one which could go down in the history books! Markets last week were tumultuous from weak equities, illiquid credit markets, FOREX markets in disarray and commodities hitting the skids …yet the Federal Reserve is intent on hiking rates? Have they taken this position because the markets are strong? Or because the economy …anywhere on the …

Alternative Visions – Global Currency Wars & Devaluations Poised to Accelerate in 2016 – 12.04.15

Jack Rasmus looks at yesterday’s decision by the European Central Bank to make token changes to its QE policies, Japan’s central bank rumors of more QE, and the US Federal Reserve’s imminent raising of interest rates later this month. Why the ECB did not go ‘all in’ to expand its QE? Reasons: waiting on US Fed to move first, weaken German opposition to a later big QE boost, and ‘holding its powder’ for possible worse deflation and EU economy in 2016. Japan waiting on both US and Europe. Meanwhile, US Fed caves in to political moves by Congress attacking it. Conclusion: more QE in 2016, more currency devaluation, more pain in emerging markets and slowing of US exports and manufacturing, and China need to devaluate further next year. Recent economic news of importance is reviewed: oil price glut to continue despite Vienna OPEC meeting; China’s Yuan approved by IMF as global currency, and Brazil’s economy now tipping over into depression. Jack concludes with latest review of US economic performance: manufacturing and exports contracting, business inventories excess and spending, US residential housing growth now spent and flattening, poor Xmas retail sales emerging, auto sales based on debt reaching peak, savings from gasoline price declines diverting to rents, education and health care price increases, and now service sector growth slowing rapidly. Next Week show theme: ‘Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy, Part 1’, as Jack reviews conclusions of his just published book.

It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown – Is Your Money Better Off in a Mattress? – 11.25.15

As European central banks employ negative interest rates (you pay the bank to keep your money) as well as all-digital currencies that give bankers virtually complete control over your access to it, this question is not silly. What are the bankers really up to? Ellen speaks with co-host Walt McRee about these developments and then talks with evolutionary economist and world-renowned futurist Hazel Henderson about how far afield economics has gone from its practical obligations to serve public interest. Matt Stannard discusses banker logic and negative interest, and common logic about the need for a basic income for everyone.

MIchael Hudson – How the U.S. Avoided Chronic Deflation by Relinquishing Monetary Control to Wall Street

The Eurozone today is going into the same deflationary situation that the U.S. did under Jackson’s destruction of the Second Bank, and the post-Civil War budget surpluses that deflated the economy. But whereas the Fed’s creation was designed to inflate the U.S. economy, Europe’s European Central Bank is designed to deflate it — in the interest of commercial banks in …

Yves Smith – Bernanke’s Cockroaches

Yet again, the long-suffering public is subjected to what passes for a leader during the crisis engaging in image-burnishing, in this case, Bernanke via an interview with the Financial Times: Ben Bernanke attacks Congress for failing to foster US rebound. The former Fed chairman is getting a round of media hype attention due to the publication of his memoirs. It may seem like …

It’s Our Money with Ellen Brown – End of the Line – 09.30.15

Our debt-based monetary system conceals a brutal fact: indebtedness to private sources for the acquisition of money is an unnecessary scourge on our economy and societal well-being. But with everyone, including local and state governments, in debt over their heads there’s nowhere to get more without digging the hole deeper. Systemically, the debt-money regime has run its course. Happily, alternatives are being explored in the form of outright free public issue of money directly to the people — “QE for the People.” We look at several dimensions of these ideas. Ellen speaks with noted UK professor and author Mary Mellor about the democratization of money and financial systems. Co-host Walt McRee discusses the current Bretton Woods IV Convocation which is focusing on the vital need for reclaiming public control of money, and on the Public Banking Report Matt Stannard takes a look at the morality of money.